Librarian, Collector of Rare Books For A. D. White
As the librarian of Andrew Dickson White’s historical rare book collection from 1880 to 1922, Burr and White built Cornell’s manuscript and rare book collections in the areas of witchcraft, the Reformation, and the French Revolution. His single most famous contribution in this area was his discovery in 1885, in the library at the University of Trier, of the Loos Manuscript, one of the first books written in Germany against the witch trials, and long believed destroyed by the Inquisition.
Ironically, this very discovery led Burr to abruptly leave his studies in Europe, and he never earned any higher degree beyond his A.B. from Cornell (the degrees listed for Burr are honorary: an LL.D. from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1904 and from Washington College in 1907, and a Litt.D. from Western Reserve, now Case Western, in 1905).
Read more about this topic: George Lincoln Burr
Famous quotes containing the words collector, rare, books and/or white:
“Though collecting quotations could be considered as merely an ironic mimetism—victimless collecting, as it were ... in a world that is well on its way to becoming one vast quarry, the collector becomes someone engaged in a pious work of salvage. The course of modern history having already sapped the traditions and shattered the living wholes in which precious objects once found their place, the collector may now in good conscience go about excavating the choicer, more emblematic fragments.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)
“It’s a rare parent who can see his or her child clearly and objectively. At a school board meeting I attended . . . the only definition of a gifted child on which everyone in the audience could agree was “mine.””
—Jane Adams (20th century)
“Most of us who turn to any subject we love remember some morning or evening hour when we got on a high stool to reach down an untried volume, or sat with parted lips listening to a new talker, or for very lack of books began to listen to the voices within, as the first traceable beginning of our love.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)
“That he is old, the more the pity, his white hairs do witness it.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)